I sat through a Yahoo Panama seminar today and dug into some of the quality score algo and other information about need to know items on Panama.

Here are some rough notes about the new system:

There is an import process where you can upload your Google AdWords account and make it into a Panama account.

Accounts and campaigns have budgets. An account budget by default is off. If you ever enable an account budget, you can never disable it again (however, you could set an account budget to a million dollars a day if you wanted an unlimited spend).

An account budget can be lower than all of the campaigns combined (Why can’t Google have this feature?).

If you are using Yahoo’s conversion tracking system, you will want to update the code. Upon updating the code (or getting a new code) if you’re not sure if you want total stats or regular stats – choose regular stats. You can update to total stats, you can’t downgrade to regular stats.

If you never updated your ad curatives from 190 to 70 characters; its time. With the new ad ranking algos, you’ll want a bit more control over your ads.

The keyword and ad intersection is where quality score lives. Yahoo displays the ad’s quality score. They do not display the keyword quality score. This will be the subject of a much longer and detailed post.

Yahoo says more general ads do better (from a click through standpoint) than more specific ads on the content network.

Local search accounts will be migrated last. Local search accounts are going away. If it’s easy to map the location to a DMA, the account will be changed to the appropriate DMA (geographic targeting). If the account cannot be easily mapped – Yahoo will contact the advertiser.

An AdGroup can have up to 20 ads.

Content match is bid at the AdGroup level.

You can have a campaign which is only content match (or only search).

Reports are generally 1-3 hours behind real time.

Check your accounts time zone, that’s where you are seeing your stats.

You can choose not to show your ads to other continents (more on this later – it’s a cool feature) regardless of the search.

One can set permission levels on a login (administrator, campaign manager, etc); however, one cannot yet see changes by login.

You can now change your password without having to contact Yahoo.

If a keyword didn’t get a click in 13 months or an impression in the last 17 months – the keyword will not be migrated from your old account to your Panama account.

You can set a campaign’s start date to be in the future. You can set a campaign end date. This is useful for making sure all of your ads are approved before your campaigns start date. Very useful for time-sensitive campaigns (FYI – this could be done with Google bulk uploads, but now that those are going away – Google needs to follow Yahoo on this one).

Hope that was useful. More details to come.